Updated April 26, 2019: Despite the current situation, Google says that it plans to support Meet with Edge on Chromium upon its release into general availability. In a statement to Neowin, a Google spokesperson said the following:

We view the increased adoption of Chromium and WebRTC as positive for the entire Unified Communications industry. With the recent release of developer previews for Edge, we are thrilled to be able to offer a new preview experience of Hangouts Meet, and we plan to officially support it once it becomes generally available.

However, sometime between yesterday and today Meet, Google's web-based video and voice meeting service, stopped working. Users looking to join a Google Meet encountered a message informing them "Meet doesn't work on your browser" with download links to Chrome or Firefox instead. (Even worse, in our Edge Dev build the tab just crashes when we tried to log into the service).

Current error message Edge (Chromium) users see.

Due to the early test phase of Edge with Chromium one could chalk this up to some changes on Microsoft's end – after all, that is the point of this open testing. However, the error of Meet appears to fall at the feet of Google instead.

By changing the browser User Agent to "Chrome – Windows" using F12 > ... > More tools > Network conditions > and reloading the meet.google.com website the service suddenly works.

Changing the User Agent to "Chrome" for Windows fixes the issue.

That result suggests Google has made a recent change on their end that blocks the new Edge browser from using Meet. Likewise, Microsoft Edge Dev has not been updated in a week, yet it also suffers from this issue suggesting that whatever the problem is it wasn't caused by a recent update to the Canary channel.

Interestingly, Microsoft has a unique User-Agent for its new Edge browser to distinguish it from the current one that's native to Windows 10. Microsoft uses "Edg/75.0.131.0" with a noticeably absent "e" versus the standard "Edge/18.18362" so that things like this would not happen.

The question is – if Google did add "Edg/75.0.131.0" to its block list of Google Meet why did it do so? While it's easy to suggest malice, there could be other reasons as well. On the other hand Google does have a long history of such shenanigans making them hard to trust.

Daniel Rubino

Daniel Rubino is executive editor of Windows Central. He has been covering Microsoft since 2009 back when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, Surface, HoloLens, Xbox, and future computing visions. Follow him on Twitter: @daniel_rubino.